Hi Dirk, Sorry, I only just saw this message. I forgot to ask for a CC in my original message.
On Fri, 27 Sep 2013 20:22:01 +0000 (UTC), Dirk Eddelbuettel<e...@debian.org> wrote: > Faheem Mitha <faheem <at> faheem.info> writes: >> I'm sorry to hear that you will not be working on R packaging for >> Debian any more. Unfortunately. there are very few people working >> on R packaging in Debian. There is Dirk, of course, but few other >> names appear consistently. In particular, there is nothing like a R >> packaging team despite R's significant and growing importance in >> the larger FOSS community. > There is Don Armstrong's r-debian.debian.net which turns CRAN > packages into Debian packages (building on two earlier cran2deb > efforts I was involved in, once with an extremely gifted GSoC > student). > And there is Michael Rutter's c2d4u variant using launchpad (for Ubuntu). Google gives me https://launchpad.net/~marutter/+archive/c2d4u Is this the right site? > Both autogenerated thousands of packages. I wasn't aware of either of these. Thanks. > Within Debian, it is complicated. I am not sure what percentage of > CRAN we should package. The most important packages, yes. But > indiscriminately? Not sure. Installing in /usr/local and using R > to update works really well too. True, there are thousands of packages in CRAN, and packaging all of these to Debian's exacting standards would be a Herculean task. An issue does arise when one wants to package some software that depends on R packages. Because there are so many R packages, it is relatively likely some of these dependencies will not be packaged, so that adds extra work. But I don't see a good solution to this. In practice people seem to package these on an as-needed basis, which may be the best one can do. Packaging even a single R package to conform to Debian standards may not be trivial. For example, I recently tried to package the R YAML package, but discovered that it includes the YAML C library files in the R sources and was linking to them. This is a fairly obvious violation of Debian Policy. I didn't have time to sort it out, so I still haven't finished that packaging. Regards, Faheem -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/slrnl4ftdu.fg9.fah...@chrestomanci.home.earth